µFlu’18 will aim at continuing to strengthen the links inside the European and worldwide Microfluidics scientific community by gathering all actors in this discipline, and to promote exchanges between European or non-European universities and industrial companies engaged in this field. The conference is dedicated to the latest research and technology status dealing with the below described topics. Reaching from flow measurements to industrial applications in the microscale, µFlu’18 should provide a comprehensive and actual overview of state-of-the-art research and development in microfluidics.

Scope

Miniaturization has significantly developed during the last years and has now a strong impact in our everyday life, providing new opportunities in combination with reduced size. It has been very visible in information, entertainment technology, and in various technical applications. Fluid flows in chemical, medical and biological analytics are reduced to picoliter sample size. Lab-on-a-chip technologies have started to conquer biological and medical labs. Miniaturized heat transfer equipments, micro mixers and micro reactor devices allow on-site generation of chemicals or change traditional production routes from batchwise to continuous production. Aeronautic and automotive industries as well as bio-tech and med-tech applications obtain enhanced opportunities and advantages by application of microscale devices. Sensors and control mechanisms as well as in-situ analytical systems or chemical process equipment can be integrated into microstructured devices to increase their usability to further fields than the traditional ones.

The technology is complex, and it needs precise knowledge about the behaviour of fluid flows, heat transfer and processes inside miniaturized vessels, tubes and structures. Electrical and optical access has to be granted to gain information from the microscale applications, or to influence those in a desired way. Thus, the topic opened here, microfluidics, is highly multidisciplinary and in constant and exiting evolution.

The aims of this conference are to advance technological and research opportunities in non-equilibrium gas systems by fostering and increasing cooperation between European and international researchers and by promoting exchange between European universities, non-European universities and industrial companies engaged in this field.

In such flows various non-equilibrium transport phenomena appear, which cannot be tackled by the typical Navier-Stokes approach. Under these rarefied conditions the roles played by the interactions between the gas and the solid device surface as well as in between the gas molecules become essential. The boundary condition models often require empirical adjustments strongly dependent on the (micro) manufacturing technique, while novel intermolecular collision models are subject to validation based on realistic potentials obtained by experimental work. The involved methodologies include extended hydrodynamics, kinetic theory and molecular dynamics.

In this field there are still many theoretical, computational and experimental issues to be resolved in order to advance technological achievements and design optimization.